MY HUMMING BIRDS. 101 



The company now began to distinguish the arc upon 

 the air, and to see that it really did not lie upon the ground, 

 as I had at first supposed too. This was mentioned without 

 my hinting it to them myself. I never was more surprised 

 in my life, nor did I ever see a company of men more so 

 than these fifteen or twenty farmers, whose whole lives had 

 been spent in observing the phenomena of storms. No one 

 of them had ever heard of such a thing before, nor have I 

 ever met with any one who knew of one similar. I, how- 

 ever, three years after this, witnessed a somewhat similar in- 

 cident, in riding through the valley of the Tennessee River, 

 with a friend. After one of those sudden storms we saw a 

 vivid rainbow, with its left limb resting in a corn-field, a 

 hundred yards distant. These are facts I cannot account 

 for, and I leave them to the learned. 



Faith I did bear, and most zealously was it awakened from 

 the first hour that my heart leaped to the soft whirr of the deli- 

 cate wings of the Hummer, as it dropped suddenly upon some 

 early spring flower, perching with ha If- wearied and half- 

 frightened look as if just come to the strange earth from 

 its long, long flight towards the north. It seemed as if it 

 had found here the freshest footprints of the jubilant spring, 

 and paused for love. And, now, I would think, I must 

 watch, for spring will hold them warm within her bosom 

 and try to hide their little nests away. Many's the hour I 

 have fruitlessly spent in watching them wherever I could 

 trace their flight about the gardens for, in my simplicity, 

 I supposed it impossible that they could have their nests any- 

 where but amidst the flowers but this, along with other 

 poetical dreams, found the fact a more practical and wiser 

 thing. 



Years passed away, leaving me still unwearied, though my 

 continued want of success might have made me what the 

 world- calls wiser. In the meantime I had, in poring over 

 the time-stained volumes of the famous old " Port-folio" 

 certainly the first, if not the ablest of American periodicals 



